I got a “voter report card” in the mail the other day. America Votes rated me “below average” and noted that the rest of my neighborhood had a better voting record.

It reminded me a lot of the letters I get from my alma mater that tries to shame me into giving it money by listing my classmates (doctors, lawyers, hedge fund managers, trust fund babies) who have given.

My first reaction to my low grade was irritation. I’ve voted in every election, big or little, since I turned 18 years old 35 years ago.

My next reaction was despair that we have to use the same shaming tactics to pry a vote that we use to pry money from people.

I couldn’t wait to be old enough to vote. It’s what we did — and do — in my family. Both of my parents are the stock of recent immigrants. Given the abject and the voice they lacked in their native countries, my ancestors became Americans because of what this country promised. Voting was not taken lightly.

One of the questions on Maine’s 1979 ballot, my first, was whether to change the state’s constitution to eliminate the literacy requirement for voting, which was made illegal by the national 1965 Voting Rights Act. Voters were required to be able to read, in English, from the state’s constitution. It’s not clear when the requirement was last used (the mind boggles at the logistics), but there it was, still in the constitution.

Despite the fact the requirement was obsolete, 79 percent of voters in 1979 voted to leave it there. The requirement finally was removed in 1983.

To be fair, Maine in 2011 overwhelmingly voted to keep same-day registration. Maine makes it easy to be eligible to vote. An average of 62 percent of registered voters in Maine regularly vote, among the highest percentages in the country, though 38 percent not voting isn’t something to brag about.

That vote in 1979 to keep the literacy requirement highlights the weird relationship Americans have with voting. We’re not sure we want everyone to be able to do it, but we don’t necessarily think it’s that important to do ourselves.

Everyone’s familiar with the “reasons” for not voting.

There are those not-so-funny jokes, like “I don’t vote, it only encourages them.” (Someone said this to my father decades ago, and he was so appalled he still remembers who said it, where they were and what they were doing.)

There are the nonsensical rationalizations: “I’m a Democrat and my husband is a Republican, so we cancel each other out.” (We all cancel someone out, so should only three people vote? That would bring us right back to where we started in 1776.)

So more than a third of us in Maine, and even more nationwide, find excuses like those and tons of others — work, family obligations, ennui — not to vote.

This year was the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when busloads of volunteers in the deep South attempted to register black voters. Many Southern states at the time used poll taxes, literacy requirements, strong-arm tactics, threats and fear to keep blacks from voting. Three of those volunteers were murdered. Countless others, whose names we’ll never know, fought, suffered and even died to maintain voting rights that had been clarified a century earlier by the 15th amendment, which in 1870 clarified that black men were citizens and had the right to vote.

The same year as Freedom Summer, the 24th amendment eliminated poll taxes. The efforts of 1964, in a large part, also helped spur the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned restrictions that made it harder for minorities to vote.

In 1920, the 19th amendment allowed women to vote, but not after more than a century of bitter struggle.

Since our country was founded, people fought, died and dedicated their lives to ensure the right to vote is, if we believe the principles this country was founded on, a reality.

Who would have imagined that in 2014 there would still be a struggle, not only to ensure all citizens have the right to vote, but to get those of us who aren’t being blocked from doing it to care?

It’s easy to be cynical about government and politics. In a country of more than 316 million people from all walks of life, with huge disparities of wealth, culture, even weather, it’s tough to make everyone happy.

Our government is founded on the principle that we’re going to try.

Don’t get voting confused with politics. If we’re going to try, voting is the foundation. It is beautiful in its simplicity.

My grandmother arrived in the United States from Italy in 1920 to marry my grandfather. In her 80-plus years of life, she rarely missed a vote, despite raising a family as a young widow and long, back-breaking hours in the family business. I’m not sure, had she lived in Maine, she would have been able to read out loud from the state’s constitution in English well enough to satisfy those who would judge her literacy. There, however, was no question about her pride in being an American and how seriously she took the right to vote that came with it.

Let’s all be that proud.

Maureen Milliken is news editor of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. Email her at mmilliken@centralmaine.com. Twitter: @mmilliken47.

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